Word: weights
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thousands of books published on obesity, body weight is the result of a pretty simple equation: calories taken in vs. calories expended. Over the past few decades, the entire American environment has become much more obesogenic, or obesity-supporting. Think of the ever increasing supply of fast-food outlets, where meal sizes have ballooned, or the fact that simple physical activity has been largely eliminated from the daily lives of children, who ride in cars where their grandparents might have walked and entertain themselves with an array of sedentary electronic pastimes that didn't even exist a generation...
...that provides a new way to look at--and attack--obesity. We tend not to talk about a problem like body weight in the language of infectious disease, but scientists do, knowing that like any other epidemic, the U.S.'s obesity scourge hits some communities harder than others. The skyrocketing increase in childhood obesity--the percentage of 6-to-11-year-olds classified as obese has nearly tripled since 1980--may argue strongly that the American environment has changed in a way that makes gaining weight much less avoidable. But the uneven distribution of the problem argues that...
Ludwig's clinic at children's hospital, Optimal Weight for Life, offers a glimpse of the diversity of childhood obesity in the U.S. The clinic straddles the border between the wealthy neighborhood of Brookline and the poorer areas of Roxbury and Dorchester, and Ludwig's patients--black, white, Hispanic--are drawn from around the city. Ludwig's unique weight-control program focuses on the glycemic index of his patients' diets, attempting to reduce the sharp ups and downs in blood-sugar levels that he believes encourage children to overeat. That means cutting back severely on the highly processed carbohydrates that...
...recent visit to Children's Hospital, 38-year-old Rachel (who, like many parents at this and other weight-loss clinics, prefers to use first names only with outsiders in order to protect her child's identity) listened to the changes she'd have to make in her 4-year-old son's diet and seemed a little daunted. "I'm still trying to process it all," she said a few days later. But Rachel's child is more fortunate than many of Ludwig's patients. The family lives in Brookline--in fact, right next to a Whole Foods store...
...obesogenic environment is responsible for our national weight problem, how can we fix our surroundings so we fix our health? "We have to realize that we're not going to get anywhere in getting people to eat healthy and be more physically active until we create an environment that supports that," says James Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center...